# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 04 15_S134
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

134

of the Lutheran Church, while he is yet ignorant or malicious enough to represent as Puseyites and half-Romanists those who speak a word for the old, glorious Lutheran order of divine service. That is, in truth, to scoff in the face of all truthfulness, all history, all honesty even of the commonest sort, and there must accordingly be a dreadful darkness and ignorance reigning in a synod which calls itself Lutheran, and in which a preacher of its body, moreover a former editor of an ecclesiastical periodical called Lutheran, may venture such things unabashed and unrebuked, and may throw sand into the eyes of a public that fancies itself Lutheran. —

As to the new editor, Mr. Anstädt, he expresses himself in his Preface literally as follows:

"As regards the principles according to which the paper shall henceforth be edited, on the one side no rigid, exclusive, so-called Old Lutheranism, but on the other side also no fanaticism and no unchurchly nature shall be taken under protection; but genuine, thorough Lutheranism, living, active Christianity shall and must be maintained."

Since now Mr. Anstädt will be only a messenger of peace and declines strife, and moreover exhorts quite earnestly to concord, and we ourselves also wish nothing more than a firm, good peace on the ground of the one and unchangeable truth, we will, although we are really challenged by his side-blow at the rigid, exclusive Old Lutheranism, as he calls it, nevertheless not contend for the present, but only permit ourselves some questions for mutual understanding, in order that, if possible, all discord may be avoided. So we ask then: Does Mr. Anstädt intend, in truth, to maintain and hold fast his genuine, thorough Lutheranism and living, active Christianity, of which he says that it shall and must be maintained, as rigidly, stiffly, and unyieldingly as becomes a Christian, who is not to be tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men and cunning craftiness, but is to be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh a reason of the hope that is in him? Or does he understand thereby, after the present abuse of language, only such a maintaining today as tomorrow, for the sake of a Reformed man, a Unionist, a Methodist, etc., or of the devil, lets everything go again, that the peace may by all means be preserved, which is no peace? Does he with the genuine, thorough Lutheranism sincerely exclude everything spurious and unthorough, with Lutheranism, but those other -isms, Reformedism, Popery, Methodism, Unionism, or did he not mean it so seriously? Does he believe that the good old Lutheranism, as it is confessed in the Lutheran Symbols, is a genuine and thorough one, or on the contrary a false, frivolous, and superficial one, and that the genuine and right one has only now been brought forth? Finally, does he mean by his living, active Christianity really that which comes from the right faith, or any kind whatever that only does something, be it from one's own strength or after one's own notion and fancy, like the heathen, Jews, and Turks? — We should really have many more things to ask, which lie heavy on our heart for the truth's sake, yet we content ourselves first to await hereupon a thorough, peaceable answer, in order then, as need shall appear, to let ourselves be heard further concerning the genuine, thorough old Lutheranism and the living, active Christianity inseparable from it; for that and that alone we mean, for that we contend, that we maintain and, by God's help, shall maintain, though all the world should chide us never so stiff and rigid, never so exclusive, on that account, as the rigid, exclusive Old Lutherans. For our dear LORD and Master Jesus Christ saith: Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. —

August Crämer.

The Dignity of Man According to the Conception of the Atheist.

Many of our dear readers may well have wondered, yea, in part perhaps regarded it as nothing but a jocose exaggeration, that it has been asserted in the "Lutheraner" that the atheist, in plain earnest, makes man into a beast, and that his religion is really nothing other than a system of religion such as the four-footed nobler inhabitants of this terrestrial globe might set up, if they could write books and publish weekly papers for religious enlightenment. To this it must be added that our present atheists are often still possessed of a certain bashful modesty, which restrains them from saying it out so quite unvarnished, how admirably simple the religion is which they, after a long journey through the "immeasurable domain of nature and earnest science," have at last found to be the only true one. There have, however, been philosophers already who could not refrain from disclosing it to their readers. Among these belongs, for example, the ingenious Rousseau (read: Russo), born 1712 at Geneva, died 1778 at Ermenonville near Paris. The same writes in his work: Discours sur l'origine, that is, Treatise on the Origin: "When I consider man as he must have come forth from the hand of nature, I see in him an animal, weaker, less agile than many other animals, yet all taken together, more advantageously organized than all the rest." These animals, called men, lived now, according to Rousseau, originally without shelter, roving about in forests, without speech, without any longing after their like, perhaps without knowing one another personally at all, without marriage. "The mother," he writes, "nursed her children at first because it did her good herself; longer she fed the children only because they had become dear to her by habit; but these left the mother as soon as they had any strength at all to seek their food for themselves. Since there was then almost no other means of finding one another again than that one did not lose sight of one another, it was not long before mother and children no longer knew one another." Of the father there was naturally no question; he never knew his children; education fell away entirely, (in accordance with which also Rousseau sent his five illegitimate children to the foundling hospital, the first with, the last four without any tokens of recognition; but when afterwards the Marshal's wife of Luxemburg wished to have that eldest child of Rousseau's fetched out of the foundling hospital, it was found that the token of recognition for this child also had been lost, and the same therefore could not be found again.) *) Rousseau says further, that the first men lived also dumb, since speech was invented only in the course of thousands of years. Yet he maintains: These men, as they "came forth from the hand of nature," had "passed quiet and innocent days," their heart was in peace, their body sound; only, alas, they had been robbed of that paradisal life by their "perfectibility" (capacity of perfection). As a good Socialist he remarked: "Property and contracts have made men unhappy." Remarkable is what Voltaire, that notorious scoffer, wrote to Rousseau, when the latter had laid the above before the world. He wrote to him, namely (1755), as follows: "Never has anyone expended so much wit to make us beasts; when one reads your book, one is seized with the desire to go on all fours. †) However, since I have given up this habit more than sixty years ago, I feel, alas, that it is impossible for me to take it up again, and I leave this natural gait to others who are worthier of it than you and I. Neither can I embark to visit the savages in Canada, first, because the maladies to which I am condemned render me a

*) Rousseau writes: "All things well considered, I chose for my children the best, or that which I held to be the best. I could have wished that I had been brought up as they were, yea, I wish it still." — Here the reader sees from whom the present Socialists have the thought, so dear to them, that foundling hospitals ought to be erected, into which they might send all their children and so be relieved of the care and trouble for their nourishment and education.

†) Probably those who, according to a report in the 16th No. of the "Lutheraner," carried out the strange procession on all fours, had read Rousseau's book shortly before, whence it has fared with them also as with Voltaire, without, however, falling into his inconsistency.